Have you ever had the task of importing content into WordPress? From a legacy home-grown content management system? Or perhaps Drupal or Dreamweaver?
Did you know what steps to take to make sure the content migrated correctly?
At her Getting to WordPress session at the WPCampus 2016 conference, Stephanie Leary shared tips and examples from real projects for moving content into a WordPress site.
Though I didn’t attend WPCampus 2016 in person, thanks to livestream, I was able to watch sessions online.
Here are my notes from Stephanie’s talk:
- Moving content
is acan be a pain. You can’t count on everything importing correctly. Be ready to do some cleanup work after importing.It’s like moving to a new house. You have to look at all your stuff, figure out what you want to keep, and what you want to toss. Then you get to box up everything. Or you hire a moving company to box it up and move it.And sometimes, even when the box has a big red “kitchen” label, the box ends up in upstairs bedroom.
- Do your homework: check the WordPress Codex for importing content. The Codex includes info for importing content from over 50 systems, including Blogger, Drupal, Joomla, Magento, Mambo, and more. Take a look at it, you’ll find lots of helpful information and resources.
- Three options for importing: WP All Import premium plugin, HTML Import free plugin, or do-it-yourself.
- Create your content model. Will you mirror or improve? Tools to help you: GenerateWP, Custom Post Type UI, Advanced Custom Fields.
- When you’re ready to export, check your date formatting, character encoding, link and image paths (are they relative or absolute?).
- Turn off any auto-publicize tools or plugins before you import content. Otherwise, you run the risk of all your existing content being posted on Facebook or tweeted. Again. Oops!
- Notify sysadmins before the import, in case of memory or other issues. I remember this was an issue for me for one of my projects. Sysadmins are your friends!
- After the import, get help from plugins for updates and changes: Search and Replace (one of my favorites!), Term Management Tools, and Content Audit (no more spreadsheets, create a content audit in WordPress).
https://twitter.com/redcrew/status/754326512367722496 - For 301 redirects, you can use .htaccess (which can be slow), a redirection plugin, or do-it-yourself
- Need to migrate a Drupal theme to WordPress? Unfortunately, there’s no direct option, you’ll need to do it manually.
Stephanie kindly posted her presentation slides from her presentation.
Did you attend the session? Add your comments or other resources in the comments.
